w0rd.ca

Let’s face it. We are addicted to oil, and by we, I mean the entire developed and developing world. Energy is at the core of economics. You cannot mine, make, move, or grow anything without it.

What we demand most of all is oil. Earth Day came to be, in part due to the blowout of an oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. In 1973, OPEC and allied oil producers in the Middle East showed how quickly they could derail international economies by withholding supplies. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 demonstrated the damage crude oil can do to the environment. And now we have the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf of Mexico, spilling 5,000 barrels of oil into the sea each day, maybe more.

Will this latest disaster spur further efforts to wean the world off petroleum and toward the development of new sources of energy? History suggests not.

“We are absolutely addicted and we have no methadone. All we have is the hard stuff,” Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, told the Associated Press. “The reality is we’re on it, this incident has happened and what we have to do is figure out how we can move forward.”

In my opinion, we’re a long way from curing this addiction, but we have taken the first step of admitting it. This is more than an oil spill, it has to be. We need a catalyst that will bring about a significant change in the way we view how we live on Earth, and like the polluted waters of the Gulf Coast, the political systems and policies that surround the consumption and harvest of oil, must be cleansed.